Jasper eyed it through the sliders out to the pool. The sky was an overturned bowl of robin’s-egg blue, with no clouds at all, only the gilded orb of the sun. The pool’s turquoise waters shimmered, casting ever-changing reflections on the stucco walls around it. A hummingbird fluttered above one of the ocotillo trees.
The bougainvillea above the gazebo on the south end of the backyard was in brilliant fuchsia bloom.
San Jacinto stood sentry above it all, gray, white, ochre—a mass of cathedral-like spikes into the sky that Jasper imagined as a set for a movie. Get to the top and there would be nothing on the other side but an expanse of blue as far as the eye could see, like the ocean.
Rob came up to him and laid a hand on his shoulder, sharing in the view.
“Looks nice, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, like lots of the plants around here. Pretty, but when you touch them, they make you bleed.”
Rob laughed. “I need to remember that metaphor. Put it in the book.”
There was always a book in the works. He knew the one Rob was working on right now was about Jasper’s family. A story about the murder of innocence in a small Illinois town, how it changed the survivors’ lives irrevocably. Jasper hadn’t been happy with the project until he learned that Rob was going to use the instrument of fiction, of storytelling, to mete out justice. The killers would be caught. The little girl would live and grow up to give her traumatized older brother the love and support he could never get from their shell-shocked father.
Her name was Lacy.
“Ah, steal from me all you want. Someday I’ll write a book that will run circles around yours.”
They both laughed. Rob said, “I’d welcome the competition. I’m tired of just coming up against Stephen King.”
“Pffft. First world problems.” Jasper took a step back from the glass. “What I meant about the pretty plants with their thorns and sharp edges is that the view out there could fool a person. I mean, it looks perfectly delightful, doesn’t it?”
Rob nodded.
“Like, if I had a picture of that view, I’d imagine myself sitting out there in that sun on one of the lounges with, oh, maybe a pitcher of margaritas on the table next to me. I’d be wearing a pair of striped board shorts. All tan. There’d be a little line of sweat trickling down my chest.”
“Careful,” Rob said. “We’re veering into porn territory here.”
Jasper chuckled and hit him. “Stop it. You’re a dirty old man.”
“And you love it.”
Jasper rolled his eyes. “Anyway, my point—and I do have one—is that the day out there is deceptive. It looks all welcoming and nice. Wouldn’t you love to come sit out here? Bask in the sun? Revel in the warmth? That’s what it seems to be saying. But those are lies. See, I just checked my phone. The weather app. The weather app tells the truth.”
Rob’s laugh told Jasper he’d begun to understand where Jasper was going with this line of thought. “What’s the temperature?” he asked, patient.
“Wait. For. It. Today, why it’s only one hundred and fucking twenty-four.” Jasper moved deeper into the cool interior of the house, into the shadows where the wash of sunlight couldn’t penetrate. He sat down on a white-leather and chrome Eames chair. “I couldn’t sit out there for more than a few minutes. The pool water is probably close to a hundred.”
Rob came in and sat opposite him. “Are you complaining? I warned you what summer was like here. We can head up to Idyllwild this afternoon. It’s probably a good thirty degrees cooler.”
“You know I can’t.”
“Oh right! Your dad.”
Jasper nodded. “My dad.” His father was coming out to Palm Springs to visit. It would be the first time he’d ever flown, and Jasper’d had to coax him intonottaking the train—or, God forbid, a bus from Illinois—because the man was petrified.
Dad would arrive at Palm Springs International Airport that afternoon at 3:25. It was when the day would be at its hottest, and Jasper could imagine the look of shock on his father’s face when he emerged into the open-air terminal and got hit with the sauna-like air. Sauna? More like oven. Perversely, it made him smile.
Over the past few months, he and his father had done a lot of talking on the phone. Their specialties were the weather, his father’s ailments, which included recently diagnosed high blood pressure and late-onset diabetes, and, if they really wanted to go heart-to-heart, what was new and decent on Netflix.
They never discussed their relationship. Certainly never the murders that had been a land mine in their family history.
And maybe they never would. But that was okay. At least they were talking.
And, after some awkward laughs, they got into the habit of always saying “I love you” before hanging up. That alone made each call worthwhile.
And now Dad was flying all the way out to Southern California. Jasper had told him to wait until October or even November, when it would be cooler, but Dad said he liked it hot, wanted to see what this so-called dry heat felt like. Jasper wasn’t convinced he knew what he was getting himself in for.
